'The Bits I Liked Best'

Much of my education I owe to the editors of anthologies, such forgotten instructors as Oscar Williams, Louis Kronenberger and William Cole. Every writer, when we are young, comes as a blank-slate revelation, especially to those of us from nonreading families. Thus begins the process of honing one’s critical sense, sifting the worthless from the good and both from the great. Anthologists help streamline the process, especially when we are relying on public libraries and used bookstores. To Oscar Williams I owe my first exposure to many poets I’m still reading today – Thomas Hardy, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov. Try to imagine a reading life devoted exclusively to contemporary poets, those marketed in our deeply unpoetic age.

Later came The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), edited by Philip Larkin, who was updating Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 (1937). In an interview with Anthony Thwaite at the time of publication, Larkin explained his method of selection: “Well, in simplistic terms, I read all the poetry produced in this century, which took about four and a half years, and then picked out the bits I liked best.” That sounds likes the ideal formula for producing a readable anthology – relying on personal taste, with no touting of affirmative action or other extraliterary criteria. Present in Larkin’s volume are all the usual suspects – Hardy, Eliot, Auden – but these are poets we already know and have been reading for decades, and whose books we probably own. The true value of Larkin’s anthology to readers, especially Americans, are the previously unknown or little-known poets. Take this epigram by Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940), which seems truer than ever of journalists of any nationality:

 

“You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,

thank God! the

British journalist.

 

“But, seeing what

the man will do

unbribed, there’s

no occasion to.”

 

I have never read another word by Wolfe, but that poem sticks with me, as does John Pudney’s “Missing,” written after he was commissioned into the Royal Air Force during World War II as an intelligence officer:

 

“Less said the better.

The bill unpaid, the dead letter.

No roses at the end

Of Smith, my friend.

 

“Last words don’t matter,

And there are none to flatter.

Words will not fill the post

Of Smith, the ghost.

 

“For Smith, our brother,

only son of a loving mother,

The ocean lifted, stirred,

Leaving no word.”

 

Among Larkin’s other charmers are F. Pratt Green’s “The Old Couple,” May Wedderburn Cannan’s “Rouen” and Laurence Lerner’s “A Wish.” There’s a good chance I’ll never read another poem by any of these writers but I’m grateful to Larkin for what he salvaged. Reverence is implied by inclusion in a thoughtfully edited anthology. In literary matters, there’s a tendency to equate quantity with quality, which is deeply unfair and ungrateful. Think of Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man. He tormented himself with his inability to finish a second work of fiction, yet he gave us what is arguably the twentieth-century’s Great American Novel. Likewise, Philip Larkin published four collections of poems during his lifetime. Counting previously unpublished work, he left us fewer than 25o poems, yet among them are some of his century’s finest. To a writer who leaves us a single good poem or novel we owe an enormous debt.